


The 9 Most Mind-Boggling Soulmark Stories History Class Never Taught You

by GlassRain



Category: Leif & Thorn (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canonical Character Death, Language Barrier, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unconventional Relationship, lots and lots of headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 10:45:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8664625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassRain/pseuds/GlassRain
Summary: AU where your soulmate's name appears on your skin at some point. It's supposed to be there forever, but Thorn is burned so badly in the dragon fight that his disappears.Meanwhile Leif is sort of an expert on weird soulmarks . . . because he isn't sure if he has one or just a marking that's coincidentally shaped like a letter.





	

When Thorn is little, he likes sitting in his mothers' laps and studying their soulmarks.

Mom has _Plum_ on her bicep, in the spidery script of old-fashioned Iuilic letters. "That's how I knew I better study up and pay attention in Iuilic school," she tells Thorn, "to impress the girl I was going to marry!"

"Or at least, impress my parents," laughs Ma, who has _Clover_ in modern Ceannic print on the inside of her wrist.

Thorn runs his little fingers over the dark-brown lines of the letters, standing out against their skin. "When am I gonna get mine?"

"Not everybody gets one, duckie," says Ma cautiously -- but Mom just laughs: "You be strong and brave and good, and they'll be all over you!"

 

 

When Leif is little his parents die in a train crash, leaving him a ward of the state.

The memories fade over the years. He forgets their features; forgets when they celebrated his name-day; forgets where they worked during the day and how they played with him at night. He remembers his family name, but doesn't get to keep it -- all the databases re-list him as Leif of Sønheim.

His parents didn't have soulmarks, he knows that. Not for each other or for anyone else.

As far as he remembers, they were happy anyway.

 

 

The first warm day of summer, Thorn comes down to breakfast in a sleeveless tunic and Tansy does a double-take. "Whoa! How long has that been there?"

"What? Where?" asks Thorn, self-consciously touching his face. Is his skin breaking out? Did he get a cut or a bruise somewhere that he didn't notice?

"On your arm. The name! Is that new?"

There's a string of pale lines on Thorn's upper arm. He's caught them out of the corner of his eye, he thinks, but assumed they were scrapes -- they aren't letters, he would have _noticed_ letters -- except these. Short straight lines, not a curve or a flourish to be seen. Sønheic runes.

"La, eith, ans," reads his sister. "Lei-a? Is that a name?"

Thorn is already on the house telecrystal, waiting for it to dial into the Network. "Sønheic runes . . . list . . . " He twists his arm to compare the lines with the crystal's projected chart. "Feh. That's a feh. Lei-fa?"

"Leif!"

Well, now that she's _said_ it, it sounds obvious.

Thorn can't even feel sheepish about it. He's too occupied with a face-hurting grin. "Wow," he says at last. "Guess I better switch my foreign-language credit to Sønheic."

 

 

Leif is a gangly tween, always tripping over his own feet, most likely to be sent out of gym class with a scrape or a sprain. One day he's in the health center holding an ice pack to his ankle when he notices a new reddish mark on the back of his calf, looking for all the world like a letter.

Are soulmarks supposed to come in one letter at a time? Nobody ever said.

Leif doesn't draw attention to it, just in case. Sure enough, a year later it's still just the one. At least his peers are so busy being preoccupied with their own bodies and insecurities and fervent junior-high drama that nobody gives him grief over it.

 

 

Thorn sees how sad it makes Ma when Mom runs off all the time, but doesn't let it worry him too much. It's not like his parents could ever _really_ hurt each other. It's not like they would fall out of love. They're _soulmates_.

Sometimes he feels sorry for Tansy, off to uni and without a hint of a soulmark. She's dated and loved and says she's happy, but it's not like what their mothers have. Not the perfect, serene certainty that Thorn knows he can look forward to with his Leif.

Then one night Ma shakes him awake, tears running down her face.

It's all over the news, the _Margaid_ is down, fragments of the passengers' last transmissions are still getting picked up and organized by choked-up reporters -- but that doesn't prove anything, right? There are lifeboats and protection spells. Mom's a survivor. She always comes back. Maybe not as soon as she promises, and maybe not with the fortunes and successes she was convinced she would win on the trip, but she always, eventually --

Thorn is pleading this case, half with Ma and half with the universe, when she pulls up her sleeve to bare her wrist.

The name is still there, but blurred. Like a cheap tattoo that's run together; like ink on wet paper. If Thorn hadn't run his fingers over the swirls of the intact letters so many times, he never could have worked out what this indistinct blob used to say.

For years after that Thorn checks his arm daily, compulsively, and has nightmares about waking up to find the neat lines smeared like chalk in the rain.

 

The state is investing a lot in Leif's education. When he leaves school he'll have to work as an indentured servant, going wherever they send him, until he pays it back. He picks a trade he can really get into -- gardening -- and dedicates himself to learning it well.

He wants to do research on unusual soulmarks without wasting the state's time, so he makes little side jobs out of it. Takes in all the scholarly books and peer-reviewed articles and urban legends he can find, and converts them into something he can sell.

The biggest success is a blog post that goes viral, headlined The 8 Most Mind-Boggling Soulmark Stories History Class Never Taught You.

Along with the ad dividends, it earns Leif an avalanche of messages from people who want to share their own fascinating soulmark trivia. More than a year later, when he's graduated and gotten his first assignment, he still gets them in his inbox every couple of weeks.

All this, and he still hasn't heard from anyone with a mark quite like his.

 

The only knights who survive the dragon are the ones stationed well outside the cave . . . and Thorn. It takes three mages casting concurrent healing spells to keep his charred and pain-wracked body from shutting down on the way out.

When the nation's best doctors and mages have done everything they can, his lungs are back to normal, his skin mostly restored, and his muscles will recover with practice. The damage is restricted to a burn scar on his dominant arm.

Which is also his soulmark arm.

The runes of Leif's name are gone, and nobody seems able to tell Thorn whether they're just magically scarred-over, or whether his Leif died whilst he was hospitalized, or whether the battle left him too damaged to be Leif's soulmate anymore.

He spends a lot of time with his mother, who flew all the way up here just to sit at his bedside. A lot of time with Rowan and Violet, the only surviving team members who have soulmarks (of each other's names -- a rare case of purely platonic soulmates).

And a lot of time alone with his brand-new cat.

Animal soulbonds aren't created for anyone who has a clear soulmark, but that's not him anymore.

 

Leif isn't sure if the new foreign guard -- Thawn, Thoan, something like that -- is flirting with him, or just handsome and earnest and a little clumsy with proper words.

Either way, something about him is instantly charming. His magic sword is graceful and stunning, like something out of a saga. And he comes to Leif's rescue like it's nothing, like defending the embassy's humblest servants is as important as any other part of his job.

By the time he rents Leif for a day on the town, Leif is helplessly starry-eyed.

As long as he belongs to the embassy, he's not allowed to have relationships without their permission. The only legal exception would be for his soulmate, and, well, he doesn't have one, does he? Just a conspicuous birthmark.

It's okay, though. Thawn has enough money to earn an official stamp of approval from the embassy, and it's not like you need one from destiny to be happy with someone. Frankly, any kind of attention from him at all brings Leif happiness beyond the telling of it.

 

 

Thorn's heart skips a beat when he first sees the embassy gardener's face, and again when the man introduces himself. He still hasn't lost that thrill of anticipation every time he hears the name.

Part of him is counting the pace of his breaths -- a calming exercise -- as he gives his own name.

A Leif who had been running his fingers over the word _Thorn_ for years now would light up with recognition and hope. Leif the gardener doesn't react at all. Any more than Leif the landlord or Leif the art professor or Leif from the high school glee team.

But somehow . . . as they keep seeing each other, keep talking, keep getting to know each other . . . Thorn's heart doesn't stop lifting every time Leif comes by.

 

 

On the roof of Thawn's building, Leif cuddles Thawn's cat and listens to their shared backstory.

"They only give animals like this to people without soulmarks, right?" says Leif, trying to be casual. He tries not to be jealous of their bond. Thawn has been through so much and suffered so long -- an artificial soulbond can only begin to make up for it.

"That's right." It's hard to tell from his stilted Sønska, but it sounds like Thawn is trying to sound casual too. "What about you? Do you have one?"

"A cat?"

"A soulmark."

"No," says Leif. "No, I don't."

The cat held against his chest starts purring.

 

 

They go out again in midwinter. Thorn wears a bulky coat and gulps hot cider like his life depends on it, whilst Leif wears a single tight sweater and does a bad job of hiding how cute he thinks the Ceannic idea of "winter" is.

Like last time, they end up at Thorn's place: inside the building, since the snow-swept roof is impassable.

Unlike last time, they end up making out on Thorn's couch.

Thorn has been trying to pretend this isn't a possibility for so long that he has more built-up raging hormones than a teenager. Now they're loose, blazing through his body, it's hard not to just throw Leif down onto the cushions. He holds back, tears their mouths apart, and gasps, "You don't have to do this."

Leif squints. He abandoned his glasses at the door when they fogged up instantly in the warm air; his bare eyes are a startlingly deep red. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No!" Thorn squeezes Leif's hips, hands twitching with the effort of not sliding up under that sweater. At least, not yet. "No, nothing wrong. I mean -- I rent you for time only, I don't rent you for the sex. You don't have to do if you don't want to do. You know that, yes?"

Understanding warms Leif's face. He takes one of Thorn's hands off his hip -- moves it straight between his legs, so Thorn is palming a generous erection -- and ruts almost shyly against him. "I want to do."

Thorn decides to take yes for an answer, and goes for his mouth again.

 

 

Leif sells a few more blog posts, based on the research he's doing now. Posts like 27 Wacky Expressions That Make Perfect Sense In Ceannic, and 5 Animal Soulbonds That Changed History, and 6 Incredible Iuilic Traditions You've Never Heard Of.

He makes enough money to buy Thawn a heavy Sønska quilt for Szélanyanatt.

They sleep together under it several more times as the mild Ceannic winter wears on. ("Sleep together" in the literal sense, along with the Wacky Ceannic Expression one. Either way, the cat will try to huddle under the blankets at their feet.)

"Here's a cute thing," murmurs Thawn in bed during an overnight rental, running idle fingers through Leif's loose hair. "Your name, with a Ceannic accent, we say _leef_. And that is our word for _leaf_. And my name is our word for _thorn_."

"So . . . thorn and leaf." Leif smiles in the warm lamplight. "That's pretty! I wish they had cool meanings in Sønska."

"They do." Leif must look confused because Thawn laughs and kisses him. "You don't know? Well, Thawn isn't anything exciting, but Leif means _heir_ . . . " He adds a kiss on Leif's jawline. " . . . or _descendant_ . . . " On the cheek. " . . . or _beloved_ . . . " On the ear. " . . . or _lucky_."

He sucks on the tip of Leif's ear. That always makes Leif writhe, even when he's all sexed out otherwise. "Mmm! Did you look that up just for me?"

" . . . no. I already looked it up . . . Before."

Thawn has a way of saying Before with a capital letter. He doesn't just mean _before you,_ he means _before the dragon, before all those deaths, before my life changed forever._ Leif gives it a moment, in case he wants to talk about it, then offers a change of subject: "I already looked up things about Iuilic people before I met you, too."

"Yeah? Like what?" 

"Like . . . how you used to have a creation myth that the Lord of the Mountains made the world out of clay in eight days. And once someone went to the mountains and asked, Lord, that was so long ago -- why haven't you made anything else?" 

To his surprise, Thawn looks interested. "I never hear this one. Lord says what?" 

"The Lord says they've been busy. So the human asks, doing what? What's so complicated that it's kept you busy for thousands of years, when all this only took you eight days? And the Lord says: matching up soulmates." 

It's a sort of joke as well as a myth, so Leif tries to tell it that way. Thawn doesn't laugh. At first Leif is afraid he's caused offense, until Thawn pulls him into a somber embrace. 

"Are you okay?" asks Leif. He bites back the instinct, always on his tongue when he's uncertain of his place, to add a deferential _sir?_ at the end. 

Thawn swallows. "I'm trying not to think about a world where I wasn't to meet you." 

Dinner theater, a week later, during the intermission. Leif is tentatively picking through the mildest korma on the menu when Thorn gathers his nerve and says, "I told you I don't have a soulmark . . . " 

Leif swallows fast. "Yes? You don't. Right?" 

His eyes flick over Thorn's body, as if trying to pin down the parts of Thorn's skin he's never seen under proper light. Which is, surprisingly, a lot of it. With the weather so cold, even sex has had to put up with them staying partly-clothed or under blankets or both. 

"I don't," says Thorn quickly. "But I used to." 

"And . . . they died?" asks Leif. 

Cautious. Sensitive. Also, using the gender-neutral Sønska pronoun, which means he hasn't even begun to guess. 

"I think he must have. I never met him. Or maybe I just changed so much that he wasn't my soulmate anymore." Thorn touches his upper arm, where the burn mars his skin under the tunic. "The name Leif used to be here. And now it's not." 

A complicated play of emotions does not show up on Leif's face. But there's some twitching that suggests it's going on underneath. "And so . . . me. That's why me." 

"No!" exclaims Thorn. "I have known other Leifs. I didn't want them. They weren't you." Thorn toes off a shoe so he can caress Leif's ankle under the table. "Anyway, for all what I know, maybe my Leif was had been platonic." 

"For all _that_ you know," corrects Leif. "And, was _to have_ been." 

Confident enough to spag-check Thorn's words -- that's a good sign, even though he's looking at the table. "For all that I know, he was to have been platonic," repeats Thorn dutifully. "And either way, he was the reason I started learning Sønska. That's for the good, right? Without it, I couldn't talk to you at all." 

Leif allows that, yes, this is a plus. 

"I love you," says Thorn, under the clink of glasses and the gentle chatter around them. "It still hurts to think about how I never met him . . . but it hurts more to think about what if I never met you." 

"I don't like to think about that either," says Leif, and, under the table, wiggles out of one of his boots. Through the entire second act, Thorn covers Leif's sock foot with his own. 

The catch is, dragon fire is one of the things so magical it can burn a perfectly-good soulmark right off your skin. 

Does Thawn know? He has to know, right? Maybe he's prepared to drop Leif of Sønheim in a hot second if Leif the Soulmate shows up, Maybe he's lying through his teeth in order to better string Leif along in the meantime. 

But then, why open up about the soulmark at all? Why risk putting the idea in Leif's head? 

So maybe Thawn has no idea. Maybe he's completely sincere. And if Leif doesn't tell him, and Leif the Soulmate does show up one day. Thawn will be completely blindsided. Torn between two loves. Forever guilty about the fact that he can't avoid hurting one of them. 

(Leif is willing to share Thawn if that's the only way to have him, but the other Leif might not be.) 

He helps Katya change the bedding in the staff bedrooms, so he can get some advice. Of everyone at the Embassy, she's the least likely to sugarcoat any chance of bad behavior from their betters. 

_I don't know whether Thawn or I is the bigger liar,_ he signs over the quilts. (They use a custom sign for Thawn these days, a digital portmanteau of _knight_ and _handsome_.) _And I don't know which answer would be worse._

Katya's hands flash a reply in between fluffing pillows. _He would have researched dragon burns after he got one, right?_

_That's right._ Same reason Leif has done so much research on unusual soulmarks. 

_Well, he could be lying, but it could also be that he's right and you don't know it. Maybe he doesn't have the kind of burn you think he has. Or maybe you got bad information, or you're misremembering a urban legend as a fact. You should double-check._

It's good advice. Leif promises he will. 

As soon as Elisa quits watching her trashy romances and gives him a turn on the communication crystal, that is. 

_The mind-boggling soulmark stories, in no particular order:_

_(1) The vampire Lady Stanczia, who had been around for two centuries without a soulmark when she woke up one night with the name Imri on her thigh. That was nearly 550 years ago now, and they're very happy together._

_(2) The soldier Herfjötur Svenssen, who didn't believe in fate and had a tattoo done over her soulmark. It wasn't until she fell in battle and one of her old friends back home saw their Herfjötur soulmark fade that anyone realized._

_(3) The half-brothers who got each other's names, allowed everyone to assume it was platonic, then ran off together to a neighboring country and created new identities and spent the rest of their lives married._

_(4) The tribe in the eastern mountains where soulmarks are seen as a kind of impurity -- so they ritually avoid all written language, and none of their names have spellings. Leif has a feeling some of them find their skin printed with the names of people outside the tribe. Either they've not recognized the concept of writing, or they've kept the marks hidden._

_(5) The man who got Duchess Svetlana XI's name secretly tattooed on his foot, and was her consort for a decade until her true soulmate uncovered the deception._

_(6) The nurse who ended Manborg's civil war after she found her name on the arm of the POW she was treating, although they didn't come with any identification, so she didn't know for sure their name matched the one on her own wrist until the patient woke up._

_(7) The Lord and Lady who had each other's names, allowed everyone to assume it was romantic, then after their deaths it came out they had both cheerfully taken other lovers and all their children were adopted. The children's right to their parents' estate and titles was challenged. After winning both in an exhausting legal battle, they restructured the province to have the first non-hereditary representative government in medieval Sønheim._

_(8) The singer who went by the single letter Eith as a stage name, and was bombarded with thousands of fans who got her birth name inked or scratched into their skins. She always wore a shoulder cuff to hide her own soulmark, and eventually met a roadie who had the letter Eith printed naturally on her knee._

Leif is trying to find the name _Thawn_ on the net, and coming up empty, until he thinks to look up thorns in a Sønska-language encyclopedia and switch to the Ceannic version of the page. 

It is not spelled the way he expected. 

The word turns up with the same spelling in articles about _Thorn Estragon, Dragonslayer_. He runs it through three different transliteration services, heart starting to pound and hair rising on the back of his neck. 

He barely sleeps that night, and skips half his scheduled mulching to get to the gate where his favorite knight is on duty. "When you first started learning Sønska, did you learn the alphabet song?" 

"Sure. Why?" 

"Can you sing it for me?" 

The knight blinks, puzzled, but shrugs and obliges. His accent adds the usual charming garble to the pronunciation: "Eff, oor, thawn, awns, rai . . . " 

"That's enough!" exclaims Leif, coming right up to the wall of the guard station. "You mean, eff, _ur, thorn, ans_ , rai. Like . . . your name? Thorn?" 

"Thorrrrn," repeats Thorn, stressing the R instead of slurring it out. "That's the Sønska pronunciation, yeah. I told you it didn't mean anything exciting." He smiles, a little embarrassed. "In school we all had to sign our worksheets with Sønska names, and I thought it was hilarious to just use the letter --" 

Leif cuts him off for the second time in as many breaths, eyes wide: "I've had it on my leg since I was twelve." 

There's a flurry of motion, Leif sitting on the guard station counter, Thorn kneeling in front of him to do away with what suddenly seems like an impassable thicket of snaps and belts and ribbed knitting. 

At last he has Leif stripped to the knee, ankle balanced in one hand, the other adjusting his calf so the mark falls in the sunlight. 

The letter Þ. 

Thorn looks up into Leif's eyes, holding Leif's leg like a fine porcelain treasure. "It was you. It's always been you." 

A wobbly smile crosses Leif's face. "It was me." 

"I thought you were dead . . . ." 

" . . . and I didn't think you were _real_." 

In one flowing motion Thorn rises to his feet and seizes Leif in a desperate, passionate kiss. As if Leif just got back from a long war, and Thorn hadn't expected to see him alive again. As if they were seeing each other for the first time in years, instead of the first time since yesterday. 

Eventually he has to break it off, if only to call an explanation in Ceannic to Birch, who's watching with concern from the other side of the gate. Leif hangs on to him, wobbly with stunned happiness. Or maybe that's oxygen deprivation. 

Thorn makes a silent vow to be twice as careful with him from now on, and cups Leif's face, which is starting to blur as he gets teary-eyed with wonder. "I have so many nightmares," he says in choked-up Sønska. "That you die, in all different ways, and always I can't help, because I'm not there. But no more. Now I know . . . all this time, you were right here." 

A lot of Sønheim's soulmark rights laws apply even when your soulmate is a foreign national. Thorn doesn't have to rent Leif for sleepovers anymore. As long as Leif gets to work on schedule, he has free rein (another Ceannic expression he's picked up) to spend his nights with Thorn. 

He still gets daytime rentals, but now it's because Thorn wants to help pay down his government debt, not because it's their only way to spend time together. In fact, sometimes he gets rented when Thorn doesn't even have the day off, so he has the chance to explore the city alone for the first time in his life. 

"Where did you go?" asks Thorn after one of these, when Leif is back at the flat and changing for bed. "Was it fun?" 

Leif pulls a new Ceannic nightshirt over his head. "I had a tour of the Public Gardens." 

"Really? You could go anywhere and you went to a garden?" 

If it was anyone else Leif would be scared, but he knows Thorn is just curious, not accusing Leif of wasting his money. "I like gardens! That's why I work in one. And you have so many exotic plants that I've never seen before." 

He snuggles under the covers next to Thorn, who is checking his communication crystal one last time before turning in. Tiernan hops up onto the bed after him, unselfconsciously stepping on Leif's chest to poke her nose in Thorn's face. 

"C'mon, sweetie, don't be rude to Leif," pleads Thorn. 

"It's okay," says Leif, and skritches the base of Tiernan's big furry tail. After all, he meant it when he told himself that, for the sake of having Thorn, he was willing to share. 


End file.
